Equality and community inclusion starts with us

It is very reassuring to see the Federal government committing to the full rollout of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) in the recent budget. However, it is crucial that our governments continue with the rollout under the current arrangements, as per the NDIS trials, which have been so successful in Tasmania.

We have already seen the NDIS making a huge difference to people’s lives and as it currently stands, the scheme would allow 280 Cosmos clients to decide what type of support they need. If you include primary carers (families), a further 560 people would also be supported.

The NDIS was originally designed to address the inequity that exists in our community between people who have a disability and those that don’t, and we need to keep it that way. If the full scheme rollout is approached differently, we risk creating more inequity in our society and Tasmanians living with disability may not be given the choice and control they deserve.

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) published a report in 2011 after the Productivity Commission put forward the scheme, to look at what and how such a scheme would benefit people with disability, and what the costs and benefits of such a scheme would be.

The first alarming statistic is that the OCED (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) ranks Australia 21 out of 29 countries when it comes to employment participation rates of people with disability, with an average of 50 per cent of people living with disability having some form of employment. The OECD’s top eight member countries had close to 70 per cent of people with disability in employment.

What about the people who provide informal care for the people with disability? The same PwC report states that in 2009, 1.3 million Australians had a severe or profound disability and were supported by 772,000 carers. Estimates show that this will grow to four million by 2099.

As a community we need to do something so we don’t end up crippling our economy, driving down the quality of living for even more Australians and creating even greater inequity than we live with now.

A range of reforms needs to be introduced to address these alarming statistics. There are three main platforms to be addressed:

• The National Disability Strategy, which has been very much overshadowed by the NDIS;
• The NDIS itself; and
• Culture change.

Forty-five per cent of people with disability in Australia are living near or below the poverty line (the OECD average is 22 per cent), painting a pretty bleak picture of what it is like to live with disability in this which we call the ‘Lucky Country’.

Having employment improves a person’s quality of life and connection with their communities and every person has a right to work. We shouldn’t be asking whether people with disability should or can work, but rather how we can support them to work.

If you think about the fact that one in four Tasmanians live with disability, you can generalise that one quarter of Tasmanians has a disability and half of that group lives below the poverty line. How then can we fail to provide opportunities for people with disability to work and contribute to our economic growth? It simply doesn’t make sense that we aren’t helping people who want to work and improve their lives to do so.

Stop and think. How many people in your direct workpace have any kind of disability that impacts on their daily lives? Of these, how many have a severe or profound disability where you, or your employer, have worked through a process so they can contribute to the workforce? I don’t think you will come up with many, if any. If you do, call me because I think we should hold up your example to the community.

So, who is stopping these people from working? Well, it’s a hard pill to swallow, but in fact – it’s us. You, me and everyone who looks at someone with a disability and thinks about what they can’t do.It’so nly through a change in culture – the way we think – that we can address the participation of people living with disability in employment.

We need to become a better state and a more inclusive community than we currently are for people with disability.

How do we do this? Well one of the major drivers of community change is government policy and there is very little government policy that looks at culture and community, effectively changing attitudes at the moment.

The Federal Government is tasked with opening up broader community engagement opportunities for people with disabilitythrough the Local Area Coordinators of the National Disability Agency. I am not convinced that two people in the state supporting this work, as well as assisting people to identify the services they need once they have received their NDIS funding, is enough to make cultural change.

We need to get the NDIS moving so we don’t end up driving down the quality of living for even more Tasmanians and creating greater inequity than we live with now.